Protesters knock Miller on immigration reform

By
Chad Selweski, The Macomb Daily

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Political groups favoring immigration reform gathered outside Republican Rep. Candice Miller’s Shelby Township office on Wednesday to protest what they see as efforts by GOP lawmakers to turn the U.S.-Mexican border into a “military zone” at a price of $37 billion.

Michigan United and other liberal organizations held a small press conference to decry GOP congressional plans to make several border security improvements – a massive increase in the number of border patrol agents, adding more drones in the skies, and boosting the amount of high-tech surveillance equipment -- before any moves are made to allow the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants to gain legal residence and seek a long path to citizenship.

“We need that money here in our schools, in our communities, not in the pocket of defense contractors” that would assist with the beefed up border security, said Raquel Garcia Andersen of Michigan United, a statewide coalition that supports an overhaul of the “broken” immigration system.

Andersen noted that the latest figures show that U.S. deportations of illegal immigrants have reached a record high under the Obama administration, more than 400,000 in 2012, while attempted border crossings have fallen significantly.

Miller, who was not at her district office while the groups talked with the media, released a statement saying that she seeks to “secure our borders with verifiable metrics” that demonstrate effectiveness rather than supporting a recently passed Senate bill that “simply throws money at the problem.”

While the group of protesters, numbering about a dozen, railed against the bill passed by the Senate, Miller said she also opposes the Senate measure because it essentially allows the Department of Homeland Security secretary to establish waivers from the legislation’s mandates and to unilaterally declare when the 2,000-mile Southern border is sufficiently secure.

Miller has said that comprehensive immigration reform will fail unless it is preceded by comprehensive, measurable upgrades in border protection that include collaboration with local and state law enforcement agencies.

Geoffrey Boyce of a group called No More Deaths, based in Tucson, Ariz., said outside Miller’s office that border towns have low crime rates and the flow of illegal immigrants across the U.S.-Mexican border is no longer a concern. At the same time, Boyce added, the Senate plans to spend billions of dollars on border personnel and equipment that could be better spent on K-12 education, maintaining food stamp funding, and increasing other federal allocations for the poor.

“Where are the priorities in this country?” said Boyce, who grew up in the Detroit area.

The event was one of about a dozen similar events held across the country on a “National Day of Action” declared by immigration reform supporters. It appeared that none of those who congregated outside Miller’s office live in the lawmaker’s 10th Congressional District.

According to Miller’s staff, the congresswoman does not favor the Senate-proposed doubling of Southern border agents to more than 40,000, which would make Customs and Border Patrol the largest federal law enforcement agency – bigger than the FBI.

The House bill that’s taking shape would focus on CBP use of small surveillance drones armed with a camera, and only those under Pentagon authority that are making their way back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2011, a Government Accountability Office report said that border security was in tatters, with less than half the Southwest border meeting the Department of Homeland Security’s own standard of full “operational control.” The report said a lack of coordination among federal, state and local officers presented a major weakness in security efforts.

The DHS responded by declaring “operational control” an archaic term and dropped it as an effectiveness standard. The department has said it will develop a new metric.

Miller, as chair of the Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security, has since pursued a detailed plan which would provide 90 percent effectiveness in stopping illegal immigrants and drug shipments, based on independent measurements of “cold, hard and verifiable facts.”